Kristin Lamb Interviewed by Maake Magazine

The Maake Magazine interviewed VillageOneArt co-artist Kirstin Lamb to share her art creation process.

EB: Can you give us some insight into your process? How do you begin, and how do you create your compositions? Does drawing play a part in your work?

KL: I have lately begun to think of the studio as a discrete manner of thinking about the world. For me, imagining the studio or salon is a way into the narrative, but also a way to ask questions about painting. I arrived at my current work through an interest in the continued rearrangement of my studio and domestic space. Both the paintings and installation works are still life, but still life in an interior space…

While I stage many compositions in my studio space, I tend to draw impossible spaces or awkward mash-ups into my gouache miniatures. I like the idea of the two-dimensional space as a space where gravity can fail ever so slightly, where things can be badly drawn and not hold up, and where the space can be a cartoon of what is truly around me. So I spend much time drawing, and re-drawing compositions on panels with watercolor paper mounted. Frequently, working out the composition is the longest part of the process, as I want to surprise myself and make new connections between the various parts of the painting.

I find the re-imaging process, drawing and painting from masterworks I admire, to be an engaging process of filtering down to what it is I specifically enjoyed about each image in the first place. I also frequently re-image my work in miniature and find the distillation of larger works to a few choice marks particularly engaging. I like when things look awkwardly composed or ham-fistedly painted but also have passages of clear and elegant moments. Much of my work is composed of observational drawing and copy work that I then re-use repeatedly in different compositions to different effects. I combine these re-used drawings with fresh mark-making from both observed still lives and imaginative sources, allowing for some images to be derivations or copies of earlier works while others may be quick ham-fisted sketches or meandering patterns.

EB: You use a lot of different and amazing patterns in all of your work. Why about pattern interests you the most? 

KL: Pattern to me frequently implies the hand-made, the lap-crafted, the domestic.  I look at these objects as billboard size bootlegs of the domestic object.  I use pattern to stage the larger compositions, but find that lately, the work has just been about the pattern itself.  I have a deep love of Pattern and Decoration painters, and cite Miriam Schapiro, Joyce Kozloff and their ilk as crucial to my understanding of what a painting can be after modernism and minimalism